Onboarding a new client usually means the same few documents in sequence: an intake questionnaire, a proposal, a service agreement, and an invoice — each one asking for the client's name, company, billing address, and project details you already collected on the first form. For a freelancer or small agency onboarding several clients a month, that's the same handful of facts typed out four or five times per client.
Freelancers and agencies build a reusable client intake by saving each client's contact, billing, and project details as a profile the first time they're collected. Every document after that — proposal, service agreement, or invoice — auto-fills from that profile instead of retyping it. New clients get a profile in seconds by pasting their intake details in.
What makes client onboarding paperwork repetitive?
Each document in the onboarding sequence needs mostly the same facts — client name, company, billing address, project scope, rate — formatted slightly differently. Filled independently, that's four or five rounds of data entry per client. Filled from one profile, it's one round of entry and several seconds of review per document after that.
How do you turn a client conversation into a reusable profile?
Instead of building a profile field-by-field, paste the client's intake email, call notes, or a completed questionnaire into an AI form-filler and it extracts the relevant details — name, company, contact info, project specifics — into a structured profile. That profile then feeds every document for that client going forward.
Can a proposal and a service agreement share the same client data?
Yes. A project proposal and a service agreement for the same engagement both need the client's name, company, and scope details — filling both from one saved profile keeps them consistent and skips the second round of typing.
What happens after the client signs?
The same profile carries into billing. Once a client's details exist, generating their first (and every subsequent) invoice is a matter of picking the client rather than re-entering their billing information; see auto-filling invoices for multiple clients for that part of the workflow.
Does this scale to onboarding several clients at once?
Yes. An agency signing several clients in the same week can batch-fill the same intake documents across multiple client profiles in one run, rather than repeating the same manual process for each one individually.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a CRM to do this?
No. Client profiles live in the form-filling tool itself and feed directly into the documents you generate — no separate CRM setup required, though nothing stops you from using both.
Can I use my own proposal and agreement templates?
Yes. Upload your own PDF or Word documents and they fill from the same client profiles as the ready-made templates; you're not limited to the built-in ones.
Is there a free plan for solo freelancers?
Yes. The free plan covers up to 10 filled documents a month with no credit card — enough to try the workflow on a few real clients before committing to a paid tier.
How is client data protected?
Filly encrypts stored data, publishes its sub-processors, doesn't use documents to train AI, and supports account and data deletion on request — see the security page.